My earliest photographic recollection is of assisting my older brother in a make shift darkroom that was set-up in a small utility house /garage in the backyard of the family home in New Orleans. He manned the enlarger and developer and I transferred the developed print to the stop and then to the fixer. I was around 4 years old at the time. I have hazy recollections of a Kodak Hawkeye or Brownie camera and more concrete recollections of the Kodak Instamatic with the rotating flashcube. I purchased my first 35mm SLR while I was serving as an Infantryman with the 7th Cavalry in Vietnam and it was there that I first developed the deep appreciation of the wilderness landscape that I hold today.

Relocating to California in the mid 1980's I became captivated by the Sierra Nevada after "discovering" it in a used book store in Menlo Park glued to the back cover of Starr's Guide to the John Muir Trail and the High Sierra Region. "This I have to see," I said to myself, and bought the book and began hiking the Sierra backcountry starting in Yosemite Park. Before long I decided that I should get a camera so that I could document my hikes and continue to enjoy the wonderful scenery long after the hike was over. While scouring the photography magazines of the day for a camera I came upon one - I think that it may have been Modern or Popular Photography - that had a year-end review of what it considered to be the top 25 cameras to purchase. The very last camera in the review was the Pentax K1000. I remembered when the K1000 was first introduced and recalled being impressed at the time with its good looks and the reviews that it was receiving and, especially (to me), the unbelievable low price which was less than what I had paid for the Canon FT-QL(?) that I had purchased at a PX in Japan while on active-duty. The review started out with words to the effect: "Now if you really want to learn photography...." Well I decided that I really wanted to learn photography and bought a new K1000 and 50mm lens at a Service Merchandize store in South San Francisco. (As a side note, the Canon along with a Petri were lost when a strap on the cargo net on the helicopter that was backlogging our backpacks broke dumping the packs into what appeared to be impenetrable jungle canopy. I watched it happen from a hilltop location about a mile or so away and wanted to retrieve them but the Army wouldn't listen.) As far as I can recall, the K1000 was my first camera purchase since then.

Hiking and photographing the backcountry with my K1000 kit was great fun and I soon realized that the hike was just an excuse to do photography. Like many photography enthusiasts, I suppose, I soon wanted to get a "better" camera which, to me, meant one that used a larger negative size. Pentax had just released the newly engineered 67II which was receiving acclaim from landscape photographers worldwide. I remembered the original model which came out in the late 1960's which at the time I had thought was ridiculously large. Back then I thought that the 35mm camera was all that you needed - after all the Hollywood movies that you watched on those giant screens in the theatres were all filmed on 35mm - and the huge oversized 35mm styled camera body of the P67 made me laugh. "Who would want to carry around a camera that large," I had asked myself.

Apparently a lot of people! Not only was the P67 still in production but had been re-engineered to world-wide acclaim. I saved and when I had enough purchased a new P67II kit complete with a 105mm lens and began to teach myself the craft of photography by learning how to develop my films and, using rental darkroom facilities until I had accumulated the necessary equiptment to have my own darkroom, how to print my negatives and mount my prints. Gradually over the years I added larger film formats: first the 4x5 format and, after a few years the 8x10 format which I use for creating negatives for contact printing - especially with the historical processes.

I don't print in a particular syntax - for exampe in the silver gelatin or "alternative" processes such as the salted paper - but embrace many of the modern and historical photographic syntaxes. Having found a subject that sturs my emotions to the point of wanting to take it's picture, I strive to capture that emotion by printing it with the appropriate syntax. Here you will find those syntaxes represented in a wide range of subject matter.﻿

All images displayed on this site were created using film based cameras in formats ranging from full-frame 35mm (1x1.5") through large format 8x10 inch film negatives. The negatives and prints are archivally processed and printed by me in the darkroom while adhering to the highest standards of the craft. Additionally, many of the prints are toned with sepia, selenium, gold, platinum, and palladium for the aesthetic contribution imparted to the image and to further enhance its archivable qualities. Properly displayed or stored the prints are designed to be enjoyed by generations to come.﻿

Copyright 2007-2019 Thomas Taylor. All rights reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means - electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright owner.